You’re sending a perfectly ordinary text. A normal request, the kind anyone might make. Could you send me that file? And then you watch yourself wrap it.
So sorry to bother you!! No rush at all, whenever you get a sec — totally fine if not!! Thank you so so much, you’re the best 🙏.
By the time you hit send, the actual request is buried under a thick layer of cushioning. Exclamation points to keep it light. An apology for asking. A preemptive release valve so they don’t feel pressured. A little burst of warmth so they know you’re not annoyed. You read it back, and it looks friendly. It looks like you.
But strip the padding away and notice what’s left: a one-line request that needed none of it.
This isn’t politeness. It’s a performance.¶
Real politeness is light. It adds a please, a thanks, and gets out of the way. What you’re doing is heavier and busier than that. The seventeen little addenda aren’t there to be courteous to the other person. They’re there to manage how the other person feels about you.
Look at what each one is actually doing. The apology pre-absorbs any inconvenience. The no rush makes sure you’re not a burden. The exclamation points perform cheerfulness so you don’t come across as demanding. The over-thanks pays for the favor in advance. Every clause is a tiny act of emotional labor aimed at one goal: making absolutely sure that no one, ever, experiences you as a bother.
That’s not warmth. That’s a performance of warmth — a frictionless, undemanding, delightful version of you, assembled clause by clause and delivered to an audience of one, several times a day. The padding isn’t kindness. It’s insurance against being too much.
Why it’s so automatic you can’t feel it¶
You don’t decide to add the addenda. They arrive on their own, the way the sorry arrives when someone bumps you. The softening is wired in below the level of choice, which is exactly why it’s so hard to spot — it doesn’t feel like a thing you’re doing, it just feels like texting.
And it’s been richly rewarded. People respond warmly to the warm wrapper. They call you sweet, easy, lovely to deal with. Those responses come unpredictably and pleasantly, just often enough, until the over-softening stopped being a choice and became the only way you know how to ask for anything. The cost — the constant low-grade labor of cushioning every request — never shows up on the bill.
One thing to try — see the padding, send anyway¶
Don’t go cold. A clipped, padding-free text would just be a new performance — woman with boundaries now — and it would feel awful and unlike you. The goal isn’t to strip your warmth. It’s to see the difference between warmth you mean and softening you compulsively add.
Try this. The next time you finish a text and your thumb is hovering over send, read it back once — and just notice the padding. There’s the apology for asking. There’s the no-rush. There are the three extra exclamation points. You can send it exactly as written. Change nothing. All you’re doing is catching the performance in the act.
That sounds like nothing. It’s the whole beginning. The reason the softening has run your messages for years is that it’s invisible to you — pure reflex, never examined. The moment you can see the addenda as addenda, they stop being automatic. You’ve made the pattern visible, and visible is the first step toward optional.
Keep noticing and something shifts. First you spot the padding after you’ve sent. Then before. Eventually you feel each apologetic clause as you’re typing it — and in that beat, for the first time, deleting one feels like a choice instead of a risk. Not because you’ve become cold. Because you’ve stopped needing to insure every sentence against the chance that someone finds you too much.
If you read this and recognized your own outbox — the so sorry to bother you, the wall of exclamation points, the request buried in cushioning — it’s worth taking seriously. The High-Functioning People-Pleaser is written for exactly the woman who can’t ask for a thing without padding it, and it lays out the full, gentle method for letting your real voice through.